The principle sounds almost mystical, but Christine E. Ohenewah applies it with the precision of a lawyer examining evidence. After years practicing white collar criminal defense and teaching at three universities, she’s observed a pattern: most people are living scripts they didn’t write, responding to expectations they never consciously chose, becoming something other than themselves simply by failing to author their own lives.
This insight drives all of Ohenewah’s work at The Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation (ETF), from her Men’s Rea™ program examining modern masculinity to her broader vision of teaching power literacy and personal authorship. The question isn’t whether you’re being influenced by external forces; everyone is. The question is whether you’re conscious of those forces and capable of choosing your response to them.
Consider how this plays out in career decisions. Someone attends law school, not because they examined their own aptitudes and desires but because they’re intelligent and ambitious, and law school is what intelligent, ambitious people do. They work at a prestigious firm because that’s the natural next step. They make partner, or don’t, based on metrics they never questioned. Twenty years later, they wake up successful by every external measure and profoundly disconnected from themselves.
Ohenewah knows this pattern intimately. After earning her J.D. from Cornell Law, she worked at McGuireWoods LLP in Manhattan, exactly the type of Big Law position that represents success in legal careers. She had the credentials: research fellowships at Harvard and Oxford, master’s degrees from Columbia and the University of Chicago. She was following the script perfectly. Yet something fundamental was missing.
“Respond instead to who you truly are,” she teaches. That shift, from answering external expectations to responding from internal clarity, requires tools that traditional education rarely provides. It requires understanding the power dynamics at play, recognizing the difference between power that’s granted and power that’s claimed, and developing the analytical capacity to see your own patterns clearly.
This is what Ohenewah calls personal authorship, and it’s the core focus of her Power Pro Se methodology. The term “pro se” typically refers to representing yourself in court without a lawyer. Ohenewah uses it to describe something deeper: being the primary author and advocate of your own life, equipped with the reasoning skills to understand what’s actually happening rather than what you’ve been told should be happening.
The alternative, answering to what you are not, shows up everywhere. In relationships, people perform versions of masculinity or femininity based on cultural scripts rather than genuine self-understanding. In careers, they pursue status markers that someone else defined. In daily life, they make countless choices based on avoiding disapproval rather than pursuing what actually matters to them. The cumulative effect is exhaustion and a nagging sense that life is happening to them rather than being created by them.
Ohenewah’s legal training provides the antidote. When lawyers examine a case, they ask: What actually happened versus what was claimed? What was intended versus what was achieved? What did the parties know, and when did they know it? This kind of rigorous analysis, applied to your own life, creates clarity that’s genuinely liberating. It replaces vague discomfort with specific understanding and converts passive reaction into active choice.
Through ETF, she’s developing educational programs that teach this kind of thinking. Her Men’s Rea™ initiative asks men to examine not just their behavior but the underlying intent and the power dynamics they’re unconsciously creating. Are they pursuing relationships because they genuinely want connection, or because cultural scripts say successful men should have certain types of partners? Are they angry because someone violated a boundary, or because someone failed to perform according to expectations they never consciously examined?
These questions make people uncomfortable, which Ohenewah views as evidence they’re working. Comfort comes from confirming what you already believe. Growth comes from examining assumptions you didn’t know you were making. Personal authorship requires the courage to look clearly at the gap between who you think you are and who your behavior reveals you to be.
“The love you seek is already within you,” Ohenewah teaches. It’s a principle that challenges the assumption driving much of modern culture: that fulfillment comes from acquiring the right things, achieving the right status, or being validated by the right people. If the love you seek is already within you, then the project isn’t acquisition but recognition, developing the capacity to see and claim what you already possess but haven’t yet accessed.
This teaching reflects Ohenewah’s own journey. She didn’t find fulfillment by accumulating more credentials or advancing further in traditional institutions. She found it by recognizing that the work she most wanted to do, applying legal reasoning to questions of power and personal identity, was work she could claim the authority to do regardless of whether existing structures had a place for it. That recognition led to founding ETF and creating programs that didn’t previously exist.
Her vision extends beyond individual transformation. Ohenewah aims to build ETF into a global institution, write books, deliver keynote lectures, and establish personal authorship as a recognized field of study and practice. She’s creating not just programs but a methodology and a movement, one that challenges fundamental assumptions about education, identity, and power.
The timing matters. We live in an era of unprecedented choice and unprecedented confusion. People have more options than ever before and less clarity about how to choose among them. Traditional authorities, religious institutions, cultural norms, career paths, have weakened without being replaced by anything equally solid. In that vacuum, many people default to following whoever shouts loudest or promises most convincingly, which is just another way of answering to what they are not.
Ohenewah’s approach offers an alternative: developing the internal capacity to author your own life. Not by rejecting all external input but by processing it through frameworks that reveal what’s actually at stake, what you actually want, and what you’re actually doing versus what you think you’re doing. It’s rigorous, demanding, and often uncomfortable. It’s also the only path to genuine freedom.
The principle she teaches, when you answer to what you are not, you become what you are not, isn’t a warning. It’s a description of what’s already happening to most people. The question is whether you’ll recognize it and choose differently. Through ETF and her teaching at Hofstra, Iona, and St. Paul’s University, Ohenewah is providing the tools to make that choice possible. What people do with those tools is up to them, which is exactly the point.
